Nobody has mentioned Computer Literacy! It even has a wikipedia page. That's where I bought huge numbers of programming and theory books in the early 90's wor

Nobody has mentioned Computer Literacy! It even has a wikipedia page. That's where I bought huge numbers of programming and theory books in the early 90's working in SV. Better than the Stanford Bookstore. The old store even smelled nice, like a very old library. I so enjoyed spending an hour once a week or so just sampling books. Anyway, I started out learning basic on a (borrowed) sinclair about 1980, and then learned fortran on a mainframe at GaTech. The way you were taught fortran was to be given lectures on numerical analysis, and then you implemented the algorithms using the fortran manual as a guide (no help from the class). The asocial grumpy nerd behind the counter might occasionally answer a question at 2AM. When Newton's method converged the first time... I was in heaven. We had a fabulous co-op program, and so I learned basic (again, much better) on an HP-9845. Though it was state-of-the-art hardware, the real advantage was that it had a full set of HP manuals, and I got to use it almost full time for a whole summer. And they paid me! Then next came a PC about 1986. I spent about 15% of my total income for that machine, and never regretted it. What that enabled was a platform for Turbo Pascal, and a little later Turbo C. As others have noted, those were heavenly development environments, with outstanding documentation. I think one of the authors of the documentation was kinda famous for his literary style, but I have forgotten his name. I also in about '88 spent $600 for an 80MB HD. This was about 5% of my then income as a math grad student. Never regretted that either. All of this investment in money and effort might have been entirely wasted, but instead I got my dream job in '89.